Go FLAC or go home.
FLAC is a meme for 90% of use cases out there. The difference in sound quality between a .flac and 320 .mp3 is imperceptible to the majority of people and needs thousands of dollars of listening equipment to become apparent. The file size is drastically different, though. Not to mention the fact that almost all music is recorded in .wav files nowadays, and the "lossless" versions are usually just synthetically upscaled for the audiophile crowd.
Not to say that I don't prefer to download FLAC when possible, but I also don't avoid non-lossless albums either.
It's all about the 64kbps .wma's. I could fit so many songs on my 128mb mp3 player back in the day
You mean there's more of me out there?!
✅ No buffering, music starts instantly
✅ No connection issues
✅ No monthly money drain
✅ No arbitrary access or availability revocation
❌ No immediate access to any song I want to hear, but
✅ I'm patient
I need to get a NAS and a sailing hat
The Enshittification has forced us to revisit the old way
I recently started ripping all my Spotify playlists using spotdl to put them on my Plex. Spotdl doesn't actually download from Spotify but uses it as a source for the metadata to tag the files but it gets the audio by matching to YouTube music and downloading from there. From there I import to lidarr for renaming / organization.
If I really like something, I get my own copy. Because I don't like corporations deciding what I'm allowed to enjoy.
What features have been removed from Spotify?
Nothing if you're a premium user. Being able to pick songs on Free I think.
Plenty of things have been removed from Spotify or just bastardized over the years.
The app is so much less useful overall, so many controls are just gone. It's exhibit A for the dumbing down of modern apps. It went from being mature software designed to give users tools to control their experiences to a ranch designed solely to corral users into singular usage patterns.
I believe they've just placed a bunch of stuff behind their premium subscription, like shuffle/repeat, lyrics, etc.
Interesting. Not a Spotify user, but that’s pretty gross. Looks like the way things are going and I’m becoming more okay with that. There are more and more commodities I’m becoming more and more comfortable not paying for.
Y'know most of us audiophiles are managing actual libraries.... but they're not mp3. Mines mostly flac.
My library is competing with Spotify.
